#36 Give Your Photos Power, in a few clicks

Have you ever wondered how other photographers have powerful colors in their photos? If you thought it’s all in the camera, you are way off track! Read on to find out the truth behind these photos…

Decide which photo you want to empower and open it in Photoshop (i think this works in all CS versions).

1) Duplicate the background layer (the only layer):

2) Apply a Gaussian blur to the new layer, to such an extent that you can’t make out the details, but you can make out the shapes:
Click on the picture for a better view.

3) And finally change the upper layers blending to Overlay:

And you’re done! This particular photo looks like this:

Now that you know this simple solution, you can add other tricks to the same photo, like using this as a border, or applying it only to the background.

You can diminish this effect by reducing the opacity of the upper layer.

And remember, this was taken with a 100$ camera, so I am pretty sure you can do it with whatever you got ;)

Flaky Collector by ~NebojsaC on deviantART